Re: [GNU-linux-libre] [libreplanet-discuss] programming language package manager

[Richard Stallman]

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  > In Guix we try to address it by importing package definitions from those
  > repositories (pip, RubyGem, Hackage, CPAN, etc. but also ELPA) into Guix
  > itself, with tools to do that semi-automatically:

Does this mean that you have already implemented means to filter those
repositories and make free-only repositories from them?

If so, can we separate these from Guix so that all free GNU/Linux distros
can use them?

    The idea/hope is that our solution should be sufficiently attractive to
    be preferable to the language-specific package managers: it integrates
    everything into one tool and distro, and makes it possible to benefit
    from nice features of Guix with those packages (transactional upgrades,
    reproducible and controlled environments, etc.)

That seems nice in the abstract, and in the long term Guix users might
be glad to do things that way.

However, those languages already have their package management, and
many users use them.  I think users whose interest is a particular
language will tend to continue using its package management
facilities.

So we need to handle the filtering for those language-specific package
management facilities _also_.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.